A balloon-borne telescope soared over Antarctica recently in an ambitious mission to spot a never-before-seen signal in the leftover light from the Big Bang.

The E and B Experiment (EBEX) is a telescope that observed space from the upper atmosphere, flying on a giant balloon launched from near the South Pole on Dec. 28. The telescope returned to Earth after a weeks-long flight, but it will take scientists about a year to know whether the mission found what it was searching for.

EBEX observed the heavens in microwave light to study what's called the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is light that's been traveling through space since shortly after the dawn of the universe roughly 13.7 billion years ago.

Science editor Alan Boyle's blog: "Astronaut Abby" is at the controls of a social-media machine that is launching the 15-year-old from Minnesota to Kazakhstan this month for the liftoff of the International Space Station's next crew.

Just after the Big Bang thought to have sparked the universe, space was hot and dense, and expanded incredibly rapidly. For its first 380,000 years, the universe was too hot for light to travel freely, as photons would continually bounce off the electrons and protons making up the thick plasma that permeated space. [ See Balloon Launch to Seek Big Bang's Light (Video) ]

Eventually, the universe cooled down enough for atoms to form, and for light to travel freely. The photons from that epoch have been journeying through space ever since, and make up the CMB that telescopes can detect now.

This CMB has been widely studied by observatories, including the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which measures this radiation across the entire sky. But EBEX is meant to hone in on one specific feature of the CMB light that's been predicted, but never seen — a signature called B-type polarization, thought to have been produced by the gravity waves created by the universe's extremely rapid infant expansion, which happened even before the CMB light was released.

"We're looking for signatures from when the universe was much, much less than 1 second old," said astrophysicist Amber Miller, who leads the Columbia University team working on EBEX. "WMAP is making a baby picture of the universe. What we're trying to do is go even further back, to see not even a baby picture of the universe, but the egg of the universe."

B-type polarization is an orientation of light waves predicted to be present in the CMB by inflation theory, which suggests the early universe expanded faster than the speed of light for a short period. To detect this signature, EBEX is equipped with a very sensitive instrument called a polarimeter that measures not just the intensity of light, but its polarization.

"Each round of new [CMB] experiments does a little bit better than the last one," Miller told SPACE.com. "No one has yet been able to get to the sensitivity needed to actually see these signatures. We might, or we might not."

Either way, EBEX should tell scientists something useful about the universe.

"If you do a good experiment and find out the signature isn't there, it means the simplest, most appealing models of how the universe was formed don't work," Miller said. "If those are wrong then we need something more exotic."

EBEX is a collaboration between scientists from 17 different institutions around the world. It was one of three balloon-borne experiments launched from Antarctica this past winter, along with the BLAST observatory, which studied stellar nurseries in the Milky Way, and the Super-TIGER experiment, which detects cosmic ray particles from space.

Southern stargazing

Stars, galaxies and nebulas dot the skies over the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Paranal Observatory in Chile, in a picture released on Jan. 7. This image also shows three of the four movable units that feed light into the Very Large Telescope Interferometer, the world's most advanced optical instrument. Combining to form one larger telescope, they are greater than the sum of their parts: They reveal details that would otherwise be visible only through a telescope as large as the distance between them.
(Y. Beletsky / ESO)
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A balloon's view

Cameras captured the Grandville High School RoboDawgs' balloon floating through Earth's upper atmosphere during its ascent on Dec. 28, 2013. The Grandville RoboDawgs’ first winter balloon launch reached an estimated altitude of 130,000 feet, or about 25 miles, according to coaches Mike Evele and Doug Hepfer. It skyrocketed past the team’s previous 100,000-feet record set in June. The RoboDawgs started with just one robotics team in 1998, but they've grown to support more than 30 teams at public schools in Grandville, Mich.
(Kyle Moroney / AP)
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Spacemen at work

Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kotov, right, and Sergey Ryazanskiy perform maintenance on the International Space Station on Jan. 27. During the six-hour, eight-minute spacewalk, Kotov and Ryazanskiy completed the installation of a pair of high-fidelity cameras that experienced connectivity issues during a Dec. 27 spacewalk. The cosmonauts also retrieved scientific gear outside the station's Russian segment.
(NASA)
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Special delivery

The International Space Station's Canadian-built robotic arm moves toward Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Cygnus autonomous cargo craft as it approaches the station for a Jan. 12 delivery. The mountains below are the southwestern Alps.
(NASA)
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Accidental art

A piece of art? A time-lapse photo? A flickering light show? At first glance, this image looks nothing like the images we're used to seeing from the Hubble Space Telescope. But it's a genuine Hubble frame that was released on Jan. 27. Hubble's team suspects that the telescope's Fine Guidance System locked onto a bad guide star, potentially a double star or binary. This caused an error in the tracking system, resulting in a remarkable picture of brightly colored stellar streaks. The prominent red streaks are from stars in the globular cluster NGC 288.
(NASA / ESA)
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Supersonic test flight

A camera looking back over Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo's fuselage shows the rocket burn with a Mojave Desert vista in the background during a test flight of the rocket plane on Jan. 10. Cameras were mounted on the exterior of SpaceShipTwo as well as its carrier airplane, WhiteKnightTwo, to monitor the rocket engine's performance. The test was aimed at setting the stage for honest-to-goodness flights into outer space later this year, and eventual commercial space tours.

Red lagoon

The VLT Survey Telescope at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal Observatory in Chile captured this richly detailed new image of the Lagoon Nebula, released on Jan. 22. This giant cloud of gas and dust is creating intensely bright young stars, and is home to young stellar clusters. This image is a tiny part of just one of 11 public surveys of the sky now in progress using ESO telescopes.
(ESO/VPHAS team)
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Fire on the mountain

This image provided by NASA shows a satellite view of smoke from the Colby Fire, taken by the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer aboard NASA's Terra spacecraft as it passed over Southern California on Jan. 16. The fire burned more than 1,863 acres and forced the evacuation of 3,700 people.
(NASA via AP)
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Where stars are born

An image captured by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows the Orion Nebula, an immense stellar nursery some 1,500 light-years away. This false-color infrared view, released on Jan. 15, spans about 40 light-years across the region. The brightest portion of the nebula is centered on Orion's young, massive, hot stars, known as the Trapezium Cluster. But Spitzer also can detect stars still in the process of formation, seen here in red hues.
(NASA / JPL-Caltech)
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A long, long time ago...

This long-exposure picture from the Hubble Space Telescope, released Jan. 8, is the deepest image ever made of any cluster of galaxies. The cluster known as Abell 2744 appears in the foreground. It contains several hundred galaxies as they looked 3.5 billion years ago. Abell 2744 acts as a gravitational lens to warp space, brightening and magnifying images of nearly 3,000 distant background galaxies. The more distant galaxies appear as they did more than 12 billion years ago, not long after the Big Bang.
(NASA / NASA via AFP - Getty Images)
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Frosty halo

Sun dogs are bright spots that appear in the sky around the sun when light is refracted through ice crystals in the atmosphere. These sun dogs appeared on Jan. 5 amid brutally cold temperatures along Highway 83, north of Bismarck, N.D. The temperature was about 22 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, with a 50-below-zero wind chill.